Theater

A dose of clean comedy, musicals, concerts and even a “spelling bee” highlight the 35th season for Palos Verdes Performing Arts’ Norris Theatre. There will be more than a dozen shows, starting Saturday, Sept.

Just as the 2016 film “Hidden Figures” highlighted the accomplishments of female mathematicians who worked for NASA in the 1960s, a Long Beach theater company is also looking at the stars, going back decades further to shine a light on another female space pioneer.

When actor and director Ben Guillory came to Los Angeles in 1983, there were more than 200 theaters. There was also a notable lack of diversity, with few Latino, Asian or African-American companies, he said.

Anyone in the vicinity of the Pantages Theatre on Wednesday afternoon got the message, big time: the “Hamilton” juggernaut has hit Southern California. Hours before the monster-hit musical’s official local debut, its creator and Broadway leading man, Lin-Manuel Miranda, sang for a huge, excited crowd in front of the venue in what’s called #Ham4Ham, a ticket lottery and impromptu performance that’s been a regular feature of the show.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton,” visited Panorama City Thursday to drop a little knowledge about the arts on area high school students and to share a few thoughts on his creative process.

When she was in first grade, Doris Carter was told to shut up and sit down. Since then she has been doing her best to recover. She may have gone overboard. She changed her name to the fancier Deloris Van Cartier.

Daisy Aparicio couldn’t believe her luck. The 18-year-old Whittier teen, who wore a red heart that read “I Love LMM” on her left cheek, not only got to meet Lin-Manuel Miranda outside the Hollywood Pantages Theatre before Wednesday’s “Hamilton” ticket lottery and surprise performance, but she was the first name pulled in the $10 front-row seat lottery sale.

The musical juggernaut, “Hamilton,” is hosting its opening night tonight at the Pantages in Hollywood and creator Lin-Manuel Miranda stopped by Los Angeles for an iconic Ham4Ham. Cast and other guests joined Lin-Manuel onstage before they announced the Ham4Ham lottery ticket winners.

If you love classic rock ’n’ roll and have never heard of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, shame on you. Raised in gospel, this woman was a superstar in the 1930s and ’40s, playing the Apollo Theater and Carnegie Hall and inventing a stage presence and guitar style that inspired the likes of Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and even Elvis.

A digital lottery for “Hamilton” tickets will begin today in conjunction with the Los Angeles dates of the touring production of the Broadway mega-hit. For each performance through the end of the show’s run at the Pantages Theatre, 40 tickets have been set aside to be sold by lottery for $10 each.

King Arthur was said to have defended Britain against foreign invasions in the late fifth and early sixth centuries A.D. He also said he promptly revived the economy and swiftly fixed health care. Except he didn’t have a Twitter account, so we can’t be sure.

Alice Childress’ “Trouble in Mind,” originally produced off-Broadway in 1955, centers on an integrated theater troupe in rehearsal for an anti-lynching drama. The play within a play, titled “Chaos in Belleville,” however, is written by, directed and produced by white men.

The character at the center of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” is “on the spectrum,” probably labeled high-functioning autistic. But this Simon Stephens play is not about autism, nor indeed about any particular psychophysical condition.

“Hamilton” was nobody’s idea of a box-office bonanza. When you consider the elevator pitch, it’s lucky to have been staged at all: Imagine a musical based on a wordy biography about one of America’s less well-known founding fathers, an immigrant whose career high was serving as Treasury secretary.

Do you have the “Hamilton” blues because you can’t get a ticket? Don’t worry, you’ll have time before the smash musical is turned into a movie. “Right now, I’m just trying to get as many people in the room as possible,” says Lin-Manuel Miranda who created the Broadway hit, which is making its Southern California debut at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood.

When the audience enters Ruskin Group Theatre at Santa Monica Airport, onstage is an examining table bearing a Jack Russell terrier snuggled in a soft little towel. Oh, dear. Are we going to be laughing or crying? There’s cause for both throughout “The Rainbow Bridge” by Ron Nelson, who filled his play with funny lines — and there’s quite a bit of life’s truths in there.

In their West Coast premieres, two one-act radio plays by Anthony Minghella grace the smaller stage at Pacific Resident Theatre. Though the two are produced as radio plays, the actors speaking from music stands, Michael Peretzian directs with enough subtext and reactions to start the audience’s imagination moving and filling in any blanks.

Driving home from a summer job making sandwiches, in a grisly road accident, a 17-year-old killed his 9-year-old sister. Fifteen years later, he talks about it — the collision, his family’s reactions, coping — in playwright Adam Rapp’s “Nocturne.

How can people be rhinoceroses? Ask that in the literal and figurative senses and you have Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 landmark play, “Rhinoceros.” The Romanian-French playwright wrote it in response to politics in his native Romania, where he watched Fascism and Nazism lure friends and neighbors into despicable thoughts at best, sickeningly inhuman behavior at worst.

There is a moment toward the end of a favorite documentary where people who grew up in the then-segregated African-American neighborhood around Central and Slauson in L.A. talked about the loss of that neighborhood with regret.

Perhaps the two greatest dangers in producing an original work of theater is either directing your own performance or directing your own play. In either case, the absolutely necessary second opinion — the critique needed to make sure the thing is the best it can be — is lacking.

If there’s one thing avid theater fans might wish for, it’s that Mary Poppins could swoop down on the 2004 stage musical that bears her name and use her magic to repair all that’s convoluted and contradictory in Julian Fellowes’ script.

NORTHRIDGE >> The Valley Performing Arts Center at Cal State Northridge may soon change its name thanks to $17 million gift for long-term programming, university officials announced Tuesday. The world-class concert hall will likely be renamed the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts after a prominent Los Angeles donor couple, with “The Soraya” its preferred shortened name.

What happens in other people’s homes behind closed doors? That’s the stuff of so much Great American Theater. Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities” will likely join the pantheon of those works, despite a few already dated references.

The uncertainty principle of German scientist Werner Heisenberg states that the position and velocity of any object cannot both be measured exactly at the same time. In Simon Stephens’ much-celebrated play, “Heisenberg,” that theory is applied to people: two impressively dissimilar adults who meet awkwardly in a London train station and then begin a process of individual change, a change filled with immeasurables.

HOLLYWOOD HILLS >> The historic Ford Theatres will launch their first season this weekend since completing a $72 million renovation that includes a new stage, new sound wall, new dining area and other improvements to update the nearly century-old venue.

In Simon Stephens’s “Heisenberg” — a weirdly sweet or a sweetly weird play, depending on your view — Mary-Louise Parker’s Georgie Burns is about as predictable as a live wire sending sparks into the air.

Ted L. Nancy (not his real name) has written enough prank letters — and received enough replies — to fill several books. He, or an authorized agent, proudly proclaims that his books have even been translated into Japanese and Portuguese.

If only we had said one thing instead of another, done something differently, gone somewhere else on a particular day. Yes, this is a universal form of self-doubt, and mentally mending our mistakes or pondering possibilities can be quite exciting.

Playwright Neil Simon is nothing if not charming and clever. He has also, in nearly all of his many plays, astutely observed the human condition. In “The Good Doctor,” a series of sketches, however, he aims more for amusement and less for elucidation.

Whether or not you’re struggling with the current political configuration, one thing is clear: Most homosexuals are more widely accepted today than in the 1950s. The secrecy and repression of previous centuries, the unhappy marriages for “show,” the lives lived less than truthfully are no longer a universal way of life — at least for now.

Will the farmer and the cowman ever be friends? Maybe only in the theater. The South Bay’s eminent musical theater production company 3–D Theatricals has been promising a “re-imagined” version of “Oklahoma!” First produced on Broadway in 1943, with music by Richard Rodgers, and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, the work long ago upended theater with its groundbreaking storytelling.

“Crimes of the Heart” offers vintage Beth Henley, exploring themes she would later revisit. A Chekhovian portrait of three small-town Mississippi sisters circa 1974, Henley’s first professionally produced play, is popular for its choice female roles.

In days gone by, people made names for themselves by doing something useful for society. María Irene Fornés wrote plays that broke old rules, broke barriers and taught something, whether to other playwrights or to audiences.

Known for putting its unique twist on musicals and plays, Los Angeles-based company 3-D Theatricals is getting back to the root of the story in the musical that set the standard for the genre with the company’s production of

“Man of La Mancha” sparked interest in author Miguel de Cervantes’ fabled character Don Quixote while giving birth to the immortal song “The Impossible Dream.” The 1965 musical originally starred Rex Harrison in the triple roles of Cervantes, Quixote and elderly squire Alonso Quijano — but the musical demands of Mitch Leigh’s score proved too heavy for the British star.